📝 Editor’s Note: Setting the Scene

Welcome to our next Ecosystem Mega Issue for 2024! Today we’re diving in on NEAR, which has one of the most enduring and technically gifted communities in the industry.

NEAR has been focusing on Chain Signatures, a feature which allows NEAR accounts to sign transactions on any blockchain. Chain Signatures also extend developers' capabilities in that they allow developers to write smart contracts which interact with chains beyond NEAR. This feature is a driving force in NEAR's vision for 2024 and beyond as crypto looks to abstract away blockchains' underlying infrastructure to enable a smooth user experience.

Another north star for NEAR is AI, specifically a user-owned version of the technology that has made so made headlines in recent years. A key step on NEAR's AI-driven roadmap is an incubation program, featuring projects which offer payment infrastructure, a GPU marketplace, and a tool for artists to monetize their work.

And that's just the beginning — below is an onchain dive on where NEAR's been, where the chain's at, and hints at where it's going.

Let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

• NEAR Protocol, a fully-sharded, cost-efficient L1 with high-speed transactions, is on a mission to onboard 1B users to the open web. Its main focus is usability, a flexible account model, and a highly scalable blockchain that can support mainstream apps with billions of users. In Q3, NEAR added 30M new users, bringing the total number onchain to over 130M, and processed 600M+ transactions.

• Despite the exponential growth in transactions, fees have been relatively stable. In Q3, the protocol generated 300k NEAR by processing over 600M transactions at an average fee of 0.0005 NEAR. This is due to sharding, a scaling technique which splits a blockchain into multiple, parallelized chains — currently the protocol has 6 shards and aims to grow it to 10 by the end of 2024.

• NEAR's technical capability and its vision of chain abstraction and user-owned AI has attracted several new builders to the ecosystem. Developers have deployed ~5k new contracts this year, already beating the total number of contracts deployed in 2023 (~4.5k).

• NEAR's Chain Signatures, a groundbreaking chain abstraction solution, allows developers to reduce the work of multichain dApp development to a single layer — a smart contract on NEAR that can talk to all other chains. NEAR's largest consumer apps and wallets like Sweat Economy, HERE Wallet & Bitte Wallet have successfully implemented Chain Signatures which has caused a massive spike in usage — in Q3, NEAR averaged ~3.1M DAUs, up from 1.6M in Q1. This translates to Q3 averaging 22.9M MAUs, up from just 13M in Q2.

• Consumer apps like Kaikai, Sweat and HERE Wallet (also HOT wallet) account for onboarding more than 55M wallets to the NEAR ecosystem and web3.

• Consumer apps on NEAR boast strong retention rates. In fact, the majority of the chain's DAUs are actually retained users. In Q3, of the 3.1M average daily active wallets, only 0.28M wallets were new, and a whopping 2.8M wallets were existing wallets.

• DeFi on NEAR is witnessing a resurgence: TVL has grown 2.5x from ~$100M at the start of the year to ~$250M by the end of Q3. The recent launch of Chain Signatures, and upcoming primitives and projects like Defuse, a multichain DEX, is only poised to take this number higher.

• Liquid Staking has grown in tandem with TVL on NEAR. In 2024, NEAR added new projects like HERE Wallet staking & TruStake in addition to established players Meta Pool and LiNEAR. This roster also boasts of Allstake, an omnichain restaking protocol. Together these projects contribute ~$325M in assets.

• User interest in DeFi on NEAR extends to memecoins. NEAR's latest DeFi launch: meme.cooking, a token launchpad, already had a TVL of ~11K NEAR ($54k) within 2 hours of launch.

• NEAR has had an explosion of stablecoin usage since the beginning of 2024 — monthly volumes crossed $2B in August and is up over 800% YTD.

• Monthly stablecoin transfers on the NEAR blockchain peaked in June 2024 at over 3.3M.

• The total supply of stablecoins on NEAR is $671.05M, making it as the 10th largest blockchain by market cap in this category.

• There has been a steady growth in delegators on the network, with particularly sharp growth starting in early 2023 with 50k delegators to over 250k delegators in 2024. This indicates that more users are participating in staking and delegation activities on the network, possibly reflecting growing confidence in the platform and its staking rewards.

• The total amount of NEAR staked has shown consistent growth since 2021, with notable stability after crossing 400M NEAR in late 2022. Currently there is 619M NEAR staked to secure the network.

• The number of validators on NEAR has remained relatively stable since 2023, fluctuating between 160 and 240 validators. The stability suggests a well-balanced and healthy staking ecosystem.